Why is BHVR afraid to make unique killers

Twins

They just wanna play it safe for ez money.

Personally, I feel you could do both. Making her permanently demanifested by default would make her very interesting, in my opinion, despite the way that they would actually remove an aspect of her already basic kit. But just imagine how different it would be in practice to have full stealth the entire time. It would actually be pretty crazy and I would forgive the fact that her Condemned is mostly just a gimmick that is like, "see, we might have watched the American version, or maybe we didn't, but she kills people!"

Wow, thats pretty harsh, yet I can't find any flaw in this critique. Sadge.

I gave up on bhvr making fun killers when nemesis was released, literally every game with different heroes like overwatch and smash bros have way cooler abilities that look real fun but dbd killers powers are weak. I feel bad for all the horror mascot they milked for the money and bragging rights. Hopefully the companies will take them away just like with strangers things.

Because those types of powers are hard to "balance". Nurse, Twins, Old Legion are prime examples of this.

the twins are the most unique killer and they have the lowest pick rate and most survivors say they don't like playing against them, they released very buggy and still feel extremely sluggish to play as, such as having to wait 7 seconds to switch to Charlotte after you down someone and victor exploding even when you are not on top of a object

I think this is the biggest flaw in the twins design. Their concept is sorta "playing catch between two killers", but you can hardly do that if you have an aweful 7s long delay between your switches, which should be lightning fast, like Hags teleports.

Sadly many killers have this problem, ie cool power and idea in concept, but then the actuall usage of said power is clunky and feels like moving through molasses, probably to render it just uneffective enough that not too many survivors will complain about the power being "too strong and plain unfun to verse".

And the end result is that many killers are just M1 variations with a slight difference, and all this M1 killers fall by the roadside in higher MMR, because they ain't viable, so you mostly encounter the big 3. But calling for a nerf of them won't make the others suddenly better at fielding vs good survivors, it might just cut off a big chunk of killer players who don't see anything left in the game worth playing.

how is Sadako unique? Her design is least unique design that we have had in modern DBD.

Sadako stealth/undetectable mechanic is copy-paste of wraith's cloak and uncloak mechanic.

Sadako TV are copy paste of Freddy's generator teleporting. They just changed targeting from gen to TV. I would not be surprised if TV are copy-paste of Freddy clock locations that have been reskinned to be TVs.

Sadako flicking is also copy-paste of both freddy's and spirit's passive phasing.

The condemn mechanic is unique part of Sadako kit. it is so awful to the point that you are more likely to mori someone in live game by using ebony mori offering than you are to mori someone with condemn. It ends up being least relevant mechanic in her arsenal.

The funny part is that they managed to weaken every copy-pasted aspect of her kit.

Sadako stealth does not have windstorm element of wraith's kit and it is far easier to detect her from distance compare wraith.

Her TV teleporting has more counter-play by removing the tapes from TV than freddy does and it has no ability to be faked/canceled. It has directional audio cue warning survivors in far advance when TV are used by Sadako. Since condemn mechanic is so easy remove and so hard for her to build in any meaningful way, survivors have zero risk and almost no slowdown attached for completely shutting her power TP. The tapes do not take item slots unlike say pinhead cube or nemesis vial so the survivor is free carry both tapes and their item/med kit at the same time. Sadako condemn mechanic has zero urgency and almost no game delay for the killer

The passive flicking could be Sadako only saving grace in a chase. Unfortunately, It is bog down by classic bvhr drawbacks. The movement slowdown from 4.6->3.68(98%) manifesting -> de-manifesting hurt her at loops for a killer that already has little to no tools in the chase. The funny aspect is that Spirit's phasing is automatic and If Spirit passive phasing was updated to show the killer when they were phasing out like Sadako and Spirits movement speed was changed to be 115%. Spirit would be a better Sadako in chase than Sadako herself based off passive alone. With spirit negative changes on her active ability, it is worth wondering if spirit is 110% m/s worthy in current iteration.

Sadako is far from unique. Far from effective.

Artist? Blight? Pinhead? Twins? Idk what your problem is, its always easy and cover your eyes and pretend something is bad even though you have exactly those things you are asking for right infront of you.

I agree that some adaptions of movie Killers where abit dissapotining like Nemesis aswell but doesnt mean ALL new killers are trash.

She is just a normal 115% movement speed killer like most of the rest. The only time she gets a speed boost is when she first crawls out of a TV. She actually slows down when she manifests.

As for the rest they are limited in how they can create killers due to the limitations of the game design. We already have a slow killer that can teleport (Nurse). There is no mind-game that can make up for being slow, illusions either. We already have normal speed characters with illusions, and all killers can mind-game. That simply can't beat holding W and outrunning you. For killers the game is about patrolling gens and chasing survivors. There is really no place for slow killers. They would have to redesign the game to make killer designs in the way you would like them. As things are, they have to make the killers to work with the game as it is.

my guess is its harder to balance unique powers

I imagine some regions are less competitive than others and as Patrick stated in Q&A, he said that killer/survivors that leave the queue are backfilled with any MMR. I do agree that survivors that play novice/play poorly are easy to beat with any killer.

The last time they tried to make a unique killer it was Legion who had an entirely new chase mechanic.

That caused them months of headaches until they just removed their power so they didn't have to think about it any more.

Since then they haven't gone for anything game-changing.

Cause they can't handle it without recoding the game

And cause of Survivor feedback... The whole X Killer is boring being a thing

They broke the rules by adding in Nurse and you can see how that ended up

And they are running out of Killer licenses (if they stay the same)

“The purpose of Pig crouching is to gain Undetectable and be less visible and allows her to do a special ability. The purpose of Sadako Demanifesting is to be less visible and allow her to use a special ability. Therefore their stealth is mechanically the same ability.”

Obviously that argument doesn’t work. Just because things serve a similar general purpose doesn’t make them the same ability. Huntress throws hatchets that can injure people. Trickster throws dagger that can injure people. They serve the same purpose. But they’re not the same thing.

I think one thing you might be overlooking in part is that numbers matter. Yeah, she can teleport and Freddy can teleport but their teleports feel different because she has no cooldown on it. She can teleport multiple times in succession, Freddy can’t, plus she gets the movement speed boost afterward. They don’t feel like the same ability because they’re not, the parameters are unique.

And if you try Cloaking and Uncloaking in the middle of chases with Wraith it doesn’t work. He can catch up to people in stealth but then the decloak slows him down to a crawl and he won’t be able to just get an hit right away after decloaking. But Sadako moves at 98% survivor speed while Demanifesting, so when she catches up to someone midchase she can demanifest and still be right in range to get a hit pretty much the moment she tap the attack button. (The survivor only gains something like 0.08 meters distance in that time.) So she plays very differently in a chase from Wraith since she actually can cloak and uncloak in the middle of it repeatedly.

Finally note that I’m not arguing how powerful she is overall or whether she needs a buff. I suspect they probably will want to buff her, maybe by reducing her TV refresh rate so she can teleport more reliably and also thereby push out stacks of Condemned more frequently. She is currently a bit better in a chase than Wraith since being able to go in and out of invisibility without slowing down helps with mindgames, but she’s not as good in a chase as killers that have a full blown anti-loop ability. So if she can’t rely of the teleports frequently she’ll probably be weak overall.

And as a side note, yes, safe unmindgamable pallets are safe. Duh. Her ability helps at gameable loops where the survivor loses site of her.

Wraith could uncloak and cloak during the chase. Yes wraith has slowdown when uncloaking but he gains speed boost to cover up his loss of distance. He can still do this but he gains no total distance gained for doing so. The dev in october 5.3.0 weakened speed out of cloak with comment of Wee bit overpowered wraith.

Sadako does not gain a speed boost when going out of cloak. She actively loses distance for using her ability in the loop itself. This is why the strategy to avoid de-manifestation slowdown is to use it at mid-point on non-dropped pallet. I am lazy to draw loops in paint so I am just going take screenshot of a loop and use the image to explain the flicking mindgame.

When your at the pallet as killer, the survivor is waiting to go left or right to make it back to the pallet based off which direction you go as killer. Sadako can channel her de-manifestation stationary and than she can time her flicker invisibility by going left or right indicated by the Dotted blue lines. The survivor will have to make an unfavorable guess for which direction Sadako is going. The easy way to counter this is to just drop pallet and than her chasing power becomes ineffective from de-manifestation slowdown. By the way, Wraith could also do this mindgame before they weakened his wee-bit op wraith speed.

This pallet is unsafe so you do not need her ability to get hits as 115% but many other pallets are safe where this ability does not do much.

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Her TV makes directional audio cue when used by her. The survivor can just shift-W long before she comes out of the TV. The speed boost does not matter when the survivor is very far away. This also prevents it from being useful in a chase. Survivors can also take the tape out of the TV next to the generator and this will shutdown TV so she cannot teleport to the TV itself. There are 7 TV equal to 7 generators so there will always be a TV that she can TP, but survivors can limit her teleporting options if they wish at the cost of a little condemn.

Hypothetically, her gameplay loop is suppose to be hit & run with TVs. She is suppose to go invisible, hit someone with undetectable, Teleport, Hit someone again, TP to another TV, hit someone again. As you teleport between TVs and gain hits, The survivor is supposed to build-up condemn meter and eventually get mori at 7 stacks of condemn. Unfortunately, Her gameplay execution does not work and the 7 stacks of condemn is pipe dream that will never occur in practical gameplay.

I do not think she is good at anything. I do not expect to see get much play after a week. She would need a long list of changes to be remotely effective.

I never said Sadako gains speed when she Demanifests, I said the distance she loses when she Demanifests is small. Basically she moves 3.68 m/s while Demanifesting for 2.5 seconds. So over 2.5 seconds the survivor gains a net 0.8 meters distance. I think basic attacks (not lunges) have a 1 meter range, so if she is next to the survivor when she starts Demanifesting then she will still be in attack range when it finishes for instance. And if she was out of reach at the time, 0.8 meters is 1.3 seconds extra time in the chase to reach them.

Now let's compare Wraith. When Wraith decloaks he moves an incredibly slow 1.6 m/s for 3 seconds. In that time the survivor will gain a whopping 7.2 meters! That's 9 times as much distance as they gain against Sadako. After he finishes, he does get to move 6.9 meters per second for 1 second. But that only catches him up 3.9 total meters in that second, he's still got 3.8 meters left to catch up.

So no, Wraith can't do the same thing Sadako does in a chase in regards to decloaking midchase, he needs to do a different strategy than her. For example a common tactic is usually try and run in front of a survivor while cloaked to body block them to confuse them and hope they pause momentarily before running away so they gain a little less distance.

Anyway, all this is tangential to the original thing which was me saying when talking about "uniqueness" it's the combination of Sadako effects that make her unique, and none of the individual effects are identical to the originals either. She's not Wraith, she doesn't chase like Wraith, and she's not Freddy, she doesn't teleport like him.

The point of that type of horror is the dread of inevitability. No matter what you do, the killer -will- get you. And that is directly at odds with a PvP experience, since it'd remove skill as a factor on both sides of the equation, which is why it isn't getting replicated in DbD.